Baltimore, Maryland – Giving children an entertaining and educational new creative tool, UmaChaka Media, Inc. today announces the launch of its latest iPad app, TJ’s Art Studio, letting young artists draw, paint, and share their creations. Created specially for the iPad, the app features original animated characters from TJ & Pals that interact with the child and provide an engaging way to explore art and creativity. This allows the app to offer a safe and exciting digital playground for learning how to draw and create using pencils, paintbrushes, markers, stickers, pictures, and more.

“TJ’s Art Studio sparks children’s imaginations because it is loaded with creative features,” said Jennifer Zelcer, CFO of UmaChaka Media, Inc. “We created this kid-friendly app to invite children into a fun and educational world of creativity.”

In the app, children can choose from a range of colorful and easy-to-use design tools. TJ’s Art Studio encourages children to tap a paintbrush, choose a size and color, and paint all over the canvas. They can also choose from colorful stickers, a variety of drawing tools, numbers and letters, and their own photos.

Five kid-friendly videos in the app help children start creating quickly by showing them the basics. They feature the friendly characters from TJ & Pals: a pencil named TJ, a paintbrush named Dabney, a color marker from the Koki Markers, and an eraser named Butch.

TJ’s Art Studio was designed to function as more than a drawing tool, giving children many options to express their creativity. Using the iPad’s interface, the app allows for mess-free practice for budding artists. Parents can save their child’s finished designs and email them to friends and family from within the app.

TJ’s Art Studio was designed by a team of children’s educators, advisory pediatricians, writers, composers, illustrators, graphic designers and animators whose goal was to create an interactive, safe, and creative oasis with new and original content. The app itself was created by Ashley Lazarus, an award winning film maker, who for many years directed films for Mattel’s toys, games and learning products including their Disney and Sesame Street brands such as “Winnie the Pooh” and “Dr. Seuss”.

The TJ’s Art Studio app features the following creative tools for future artists to create their masterpieces: * 4 Design Tools – Kids can experiment with a variety of artistic tools, including a paintbrush, pencil, marker, and eraser * Shapes and More – This feature allows the child to create shapes and numbers in a color of his or her choice, promoting early alphabet and math skills along with creating art * Playful Stickers – Kids can choose from 65 fun and colorful images to accent their artwork or make collages * Colorful Backgrounds – Beach scenes, snowy landscapes, and other backgrounds help ignite the spark of creativity and serve as a backdrop for art * Photo and Art Album – Kids can access any photo on the iPad to include in their designs, personalizing their creations

Pricing and Availability: TJ’s Art Studio 1.04 is currently available for sale worldwide through the App Store in the Education category for $1.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies). Review copies are available upon request.

UmaChaka Media, Inc. is a web and mobile driven company that produces and distributes fun family edutainment and edutainment content for digital and conventional media. UmaChaka’s flagship brand is “TJ & Pals”, a subscription model website, apps and multi-media, safeplay, digital playground for kids. Several years in development, TJ & Pals has created, and continues to create, new and original content – as well as interactive software to make the content fun and easy-to-use – both on the web and mobile apps. Copyright (C) 2012 UmaChaka Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.